Sun Microsystems' Data Warehouse in 2009 Guinness Book

The 2009 Guinness Book edition will have a surprise category. The pages that feature the record for 'Fastest Time To Push An Orange A Mile With One’s Nose' and 'Most Lives Saved By A Parrot, will also include one for the world's largest data warehouse.

The warehouse built and housed at Sun Microsystems' Menlo Park, California campus is powered by Sun's SPARC Enterprise M9000 server and is capable of managing one petabyte of raw data. That means about six trillion rows of transactional data and more than 185 million searchable documents, such as emails, reports and spreadsheets, says the company.

The news, while attention grabbing, is also a neat way to show off Sun's technology.

"The data warehouse demonstrates the capabilities of the M9000 server and all its big features such as throughput, capacity and tolerance," says Shannon Elwell, director, enterprise servers and marketing at Sun. "It shows what the M9000 can do."
Sun partnered with Sybase and BMMsoft to build the warehouse, which is reportedly more than 34 times larger than the largest industry standard benchmark and twice the size of the largest commercial data warehouse known to date. Still it consumes 91 percent less energy than conventional solutions, says the company.

(Photo: Sun's Comparison Chart)


"Anyone can build something that big but we actually built it very, very small," says Elwell. "We made it eco-friendly while managing our customers' needs."

Sun and Sybase started on the project in November 2007 and worked with the Guinness Book to enter the category that did not exist in previous editions.